Letters from the Asylum: Three Complete Novellas

By Allan Leverone

The three horror/dark fiction novellas that make up this collection were previously released separately, in 2011 and 2012. They are offered here together in one volume for the first time.

DARKNESS FALLS: Once-bestselling novelist Tyler Beckman returns to his old hometown of Darkness Falls, NH in a last-ditch effort to break his writer's block.

In doing so, he discovers he may have to sacrifice more than he ever imagined if he is to stand any chance at reclaiming his former glory.

HEARTLESS: Serial-killing drifter Gary Newton selects his latest victims, a pair of college coeds. Only after kidnapping them at knifepoint inside their own car does he discover the girls may be much more - and much less - than he realizes.

THE BECOMING: Twelve-year-old Tim McKenna skips school to explore and abandoned mine shaft. But when he gets lost, his frantic mother marhsals a massive search.

After being missing for more than a day, Tim returns home apparently unharmed. But not unchanged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rock Bottom Books
• Release date: Jun 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513076577

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Copyright ©2015 by Allan Leverone

All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is unintended and entirely coincidental.

Thanks to:

Kealan Patrick Burke and Elderlemon Design for the outstanding cover art, and to Shane Staley and everyone at Delirium Books/DarkFuse for the original publication of the first two novellas in this collection, DARKNESS FALLS and HEARTLESS, as part of the Delirium Books collectible novella series, in 2011 and 2012.

Darkness Falls

In the spring of 2011 I had finished writing a novel titled PASKAGANKEE and was casting about for a publisher. I was familiar with Delirium Books, the Indie publisher of horror/dark fiction, and impressed with the quality of their work as well as the names on their roster of authors, so it was an easy decision to submit the book to them.

A few weeks after submission I received what might have been the nicest, most complimentary rejection ever for one of my works. Shane Staley wrote me a personal note, saying that while he didn’t believe PASKAGANKEE to be a good fit for him, he wanted to invite me to submit a shorter work to be considered for the Delirium Books collectible novella series.

While I was disappointed not to have placed PASKAGANKEE, I was thrilled beyond belief to have the opportunity to potentially be published by the outfit that had released works by Tom Piccirilli and Ronald Malfi, two of my favorite writers and just a couple of the many outstanding authors to be published by Delirium.

It just so happened at that time that I had a short story kicking around called Darkness Falls, about a once-successful novelist so haunted by the demons from his past that he loses his writing mojo and decides the only way to overcome his writer’s block is to return to the tiny, isolated village he grew up in and face those demons head-on.

The story was too short for Delirium’s purposes at about eight thousand words. But I hadn’t been satisfied with it since finishing it, feeling like it needed to be more fully developed.

I tore the story down and rewrote it, starting completely from scratch, giving my novelist, Tyler Beckman, an old girlfriend and adding another character as well. I wanted this novella to be creepy and atmospheric, and so I worked hard on pacing, trying to provoke in the reader an uneasiness that starts at the beginning of the novella and gradually transforms into full-blown horror at the end.

I like to think I succeeded, and Shane Staley thought so as well. Just a few days after submission, Delirium offered me a contract to release DARKNESS FALLS in September 2011, in ebook and limited edition hardcover formats. I signed that contract and returned it absolutely as fast as I could, just in case Shane changed his mind.

In the time since that first Delirium Books contract was signed, I wrote another novella for Delirium Books, which eventually rebranded into DarkFuse, as well as two novels and am under contract for two more DarkFuse novels over the next two years.

About a year ago I received a rights reversion from DarkFuse for those two novellas, as part of their rebranding strategy involved a greater emphasis on longer works. To say I am grateful to Shane for inviting me to submit to the Delirium Books collectible novella series four years ago would be a massive understatement, and I am proud to offer DARKNESS FALLS as the first entry in this three-novella collection of dark fiction.

1

Tyler Beckman’s four-wheel-drive Toyota SUV struggled up the side of Sunrise Mountain, its wheels scrabbling for purchase on the crumbling northern New Hampshire road. Rocks and pebbles and baseball-sized chunks of broken pavement flew from under the tires and Tyler checked his rear view every few seconds, praying no vehicle would overtake him. If one did, it would be peppered with buckshot in a matter of seconds.

Tyler was nervous, sweating profusely, and he wiped his forehead with the rolled-up sleeve of his ratty flannel shirt as he manhandled the steering wheel in a constant struggle to avoiding sliding right off the side of the mountain. He wasn’t sure whether his case of the jitters was thanks to the shitty road conditions or the fact that he was returning to this God-awful tiny town after so many years away. He decided he didn’t really want to know.

Skeletal oak trees and centuries-old evergreens crowded in on the road from both sides as if fighting to reclaim territory they viewed as rightfully theirs.

They seemed to be winning the battle. Their bony claws scraped the side of the SUV and Tyler began to feel a creeping sense of claustrophobia. It felt as though the trees were about to pluck him right out of his car and into the forest.

From somewhere close by, a crack of thunder shook the Toyota on its springs and a muted flash of lightning illuminated the layer of swirling black clouds suspended just over the treetops.

Tyler wondered if it was an omen.

The road felt narrower and rougher than he remembered from his childhood; it stopped short of being a cow path, but not by much. He wondered whether any maintenance at all had been done on the goddamned things since he left. He doubted it.

The truck crested a hill and turned a corner and just like that, Tyler was descending the other side of Sunrise Mountain into his old hometown of Darkness Falls. Even as a kid, when the Falls was still the only place he had ever lived, Tyler remembered wondering what the original settlers way back in the 1600s could possibly have been thinking, establishing a village in this remote valley sandwiched between two good-sized New England mountains.

Not for the first time, Tyler questioned his intelligence—or maybe his sanity—in returning to this cursed place.

Too late now, he muttered to nobody, knowing the statement was not really true. He could still make a nice, neat K-turn on this deserted piece of shit mountain road and get the fuck out, no blood, no foul. No one in Darkness Falls would know the difference or care.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes and continued on anyway.

***

The house was ancient, originally built somewhere between 1680 and 1700—even the Darkness Falls residents most well-versed in their town’s history could not place the date of construction any more accurately that that—by an early settler who was by all accounts a family man and community leader.

Upstanding. Church-going. Well-respected.

Right up until he murdered his family in their beds. Joshua Lachance took a sharpened farm implement—a pickaxe, it was later determined—to his wife and six children in the middle of the night, wielding the tool like a man possessed. By the time he was finished, there was nothing left behind but corpses and blood.

And, of course, the house.

Once the assorted body parts were removed and the blood scrubbed away, the New England farmhouse stood as charming and picturesque as ever. Over the intervening centuries, various owners had completed various projects, constructing additions and performing maintenance, but the home remained essentially the same as it had been the night Joshua Lachance inexplicably descended into madness.

Now it belonged to Tyler Beckham, at least as much as a rental could be said to belong to a man who had written a check to the realtor charged with maintaining the empty property.

He sat perched in the middle of the room he had decided to use as an office. It was a bedroom, technically, one of six on the second floor of the big house, but Tyler didn’t give a damn about formalities. He had decided to make it his office, so it was his office.

Tyler pounded the keys on his laptop with a single-mindedness of purpose, lost in his work. It was the same sort of manic intensity he used to experience all the time but hadn’t felt in years.

Hell, if he was being honest with himself, he had long since given up on ever experiencing it again. And yet, here he was, not six hours after moving his few meager belongings into his new digs, and he was hard at work.

His computer lay atop a six-foot-long two-by-eight plank that Tyler had uncovered while rummaging around in the dank earthen-floor basement of the old house. He carried it up the two stories to his new home office, struggling all the way, banging the plank into walls and narrowly avoiding putting one end of it through a window. Then he stretched it between a pair of paint-splattered sawhorses before setting immediately to work.

Time and moisture had cause the plank to warp slightly, giving Tyler’s makeshift desk the ramshackle appearance of a child’s tree house, built by a twelve year old with more enthusiasm than skill. He didn’t care. The wobble of his computer, tilting to the left when he struck the left side of the keyboard and to the right when he typed on the right side, barely slowed his creative process.

After the first few minutes he didn’t even notice. He just wrote. Words flowed out of him like they had done in the old days, firing in the synapses of his brain and then down his arms and out his fingers, words piling up into pages of prose strung together in almost lyrical fashion, crowding onto the computer screen and telling his story.

Behind Tyler, the setting sun struggled to fight its way through windows covered in grime, windows that looked as though they hadn’t been washed in years, maybe decades. Cardboard boxes filled with Tyler’s unpacked belongings surrounded him as he worked, casting lengthening shadows across the floor as the afternoon moved toward night.

And still he typed.

2

Tyler Beckman burst onto the literary scene in the mid-1990s, leaving his home town of Darkness Falls, New Hampshire and all the tragedy of his young life behind and releasing a string of bestselling gothic horror novels, one per year for the first six years of his career, each succeeding book outselling his previous ones. Two were optioned by a moderately successful Hollywood producer, eventually becoming moderately successful Hollywood films.

Fame and fortune followed. Time Magazine ran a cover story asking, Is Tyler Beckman the next Stephen King? and on the magazine’s cover there had been a shot of King with his hands around Tyler’s neck, pretending to strangle him. The world was his oyster. There was money, and there were women, and there were fast cars and booze and coke, too much of all of them.

A string of failed marriages and failed business ventures left the rising novelist with little of his accumulated fortune, but who cared, right? There would always be another book, another movie, more money, more women and cars and booze and coke, right?

Wouldn’t there?

It turned out there would not. Because overnight it all ended. The inspiration vanished like white powder cut into neat thin lines on a mirror. The words stopped flowing and the books stopped being written and the movie deals dried up. By 2003 Tyler Beckman was an afterthought in the literary world, no longer writing books, moving around the country doing odd jobs, sometimes living out of his car.

He worked as a tour guide at a Southwestern national park, as a housepainter, an apple-picker, a cab-driver, most of the time earning barely more than minimum wage, sometimes not even that. Eventually he landed at an exclusive prep school in upstate New York, teaching English and Composition to spoiled rich kids, unable to write more than a few coherent sentences and wondering what in the bloody hell had happened.

Nobody compared him to Stephen King anymore, because nobody talked about him anymore.

After that one excruciating year spent trying to teach cynical kids things they didn’t care about, Tyler came to a conclusion he would have considered unimaginable a few years before. He would leave New York and return to the tiny New England town he had escaped nearly two decades earlier. Darkness Falls was the scene of his own real-life horror, the fertile ground from which had sprung all of the material for his best work, the birthplace of the demons he had spent his entire adult life trying to exorcise. His own horrible muse.

He loaded the handful of possessions he had somehow managed to retain through all of the marital and financial failures into his trusty five-year-old Toyota—there was depressingly little to show for ten years of writing and half-dozen successful books; it all fit into the compact SUV with plenty of room to spare—and drove nine hours straight, arriving in Darkness Falls in the purple-green gloom of a gathering thunderstorm. It was like a cliché, and the most appropriate welcome home Tyler Beckman could imagine.

Inside of two days, Tyler had rented the big, rambling farmhouse that had stood empty for almost twenty years. He hired a realtor he found in the tiny downtown section of Darkness Falls—it was still just as small as it had been when Tyler left, boasting just the one broker—to show him available rental properties, all the while knowing exactly which house he wanted.

When he lowered himself into the supple leather seats of the realtor’s Lexus and inquired as to the availability of the old Stowe house, the woman first pretended not to hear him and then ignored the question completely until he asked it again.

She suggested an airy ten-year-old split complete with remodeled kitchen and working fireplace—great for a young bachelor!—and in response Tyler again suggested the old Stowe house.

She suggested a nice downtown apartment and he suggested the Stowe house.

Finally the woman gave in, driving them to the outskirts of Darkness Falls and beyond, bouncing the car down a little-used country lane that made the Sunrise Mountain access road seem like a four-lane superhighway by comparison. She turned into what had at one time been a gravel driveway but was now a mostly weed-choked flat spot where the grass had grown in thick and heavy.

The house loomed large and silent against the backdrop of endless forest, running uninterrupted from New Hampshire deep into Canada. It reminded Tyler of Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?—a matronly Hollywood actress who had once been a ravishing beauty but had now nearly completed her slide into broken-down old age.

He stepped out of the car, nervous, sweating heavily, ignoring the curious glances the realtor flashed in his direction when she thought he wasn’t looking. He turned and waited for the woman to get out of her car and join him and thought for a moment she would refuse. Finally she opened her door, reluctance plain on her face, and escorted Tyler Beckman around the property.

I’ve owned the real estate office here in Darkness Falls for a long time, she volunteered, struggling to turn the key in a front door lock that had not been used in close to twenty years.

Tyler knew where she was going and refused to help her get there. Is that so?

Oh, yes. I had been in business for several years by the time...well, you know, by the time...

Tyler scrunched up his face, hoping to achieve a look of confusion. By the time...?

He shook his head and shrugged and waited for her to finish her thought, feeling like an asshole but figuring she deserved he embarrassment. She should have kept her damn mouth shut.

Well, you know, she finally continued. By the time he killed your family.

Ah. Tyler nodded, as if he could for even one moment have forgotten the identity of the man who butchered his mother, father and sister so long ago. As if he could have forgotten the jury’s verdict at the end of Stowe’s murder trial: Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. As if he could have forgotten that Rufus Stowe had been remanded to the Granite State Home for the Criminally Insane to live out the remainder of his days in taxpayer-funded comfort while Tyler’s entire family moldered in their graves.

He turned a harsh glare on the realtor and asked, Shall we continue? in a voice husky with emotion. He knew that everyone in town who still remembered him—and that amounted to pretty much everyone in town, since Ty Beckman was by far Darkness Falls’ most famous native son—would consider him every bit as crazy as Rufus Stowe once they found out he had moved into the old lunatic’s house.

Plenty of townspeople viewed it as haunted, considering its violent history, but Tyler didn’t care. He was confortable with ghosts; he carried plenty of them around himself.

Maybe his could make a few new friends.

3

A single bulb hung from the ceiling by its exposed wiring.